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Saturday, 12 August 2017

A Good Old Rant – Ruth Hatfield

Last month I was invited to my old Sixth Form College, Hills
Road in Cambridge, to talk to their creative writing group and the shortlisted
authors in a short story competition they’d been running. I also had to judge
the shortlist and select a winner, which was a job that sounded great on paper
but was a bit overwhelming when it came to actually doing it – being responsible
for raining on all the non-winning parades was a bit brutal. But the main
dilemma I faced was that I don’t really talk much to older teenagers – my
published books so far are all middle grade, and although I’ve written stuff
for older readers it’s all now safely buried under tons of earth in the back garden
making the worms happy.

The usual stuff about heroes and villains wasn’t going to
cut it –sixteen year olds know a good about nuance and subversion, and have to face
up to plenty of it in their everyday lives. And I know that teenagers’ lives
have changed a lot in the last twenty years, so I suspect I don’t know much
about what it’s like to actually be one, these days. What could I say that was relevant?

I floundered for a bit, then seized on it – this was
actually brilliant! I could have a proper, emotional, political rant – the kind
that usually only comes out after a beer or several. I’m terrified of being political
in schools when talking to a younger audience, but the dark doubts of an author
are often all-consuming, and at home I do tend to answer mine with the absolute
conviction that creative writing is both personally helpful and of huge
political importance.

It was easy to start and much harder to stop after that, and
it felt so good to be able to talk about the things I really feel strongly
about: the fact that art is so undervalued in terms of educational achievement
(mainly because it’s hard to assess and mark, I guess); the fact that art is
misunderstood, threatened, dismissed and discounted by authorities of all sorts;
most of all, my own perception of the sad political situation we’re in now,
where a hopeful ideology of any kind from any part of the political spectrum
seems entirely absent. And the desperate need we have to counter this by
remembering the value of new ideas, of imagination and of creativity.

I won’t replicate the entire rant here, mainly because I
think in retrospect I could have said it much more succinctly by using those
words of Emily Dickinson’s: “Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in
the soul/ And sings the tune without the words…” And just added: creative
writing puts that tune into words. Words spread.

To those awful, unimaginative people who currently seem to make
up the ruling establishment and hold our lives firmly by the throats, trying to
tell us that the past was better, the best response can only be to keep writing
about the beautiful future yet to come, to keep exploring and explaining our
humanity to each other, in the certain conviction that we’ll be proved right in
the end, even if we aren’t here to see it.

It was really, really great to be able to say that sort of
thing not just to friends in the pub, but to an audience of strangers.
Definitely another moment of feeling privileged to be a writer. I just have to
work out how to say the same to year 6s now…